Orange Business delivered teleworking in record time to ensure business continuity

The packaging industry is facing a twin challenge as countries increasingly lock down across the globe to control the spread of COVID-19. They need to cope with disrupted supply chains and address a consumer focus on packaging.

As the pandemic unfolds, consumers worried about infection and cross-contamination are becoming wary of packaging-free products and produce in supermarkets. For example, in countries where coffee shops are still open, most have banned reusable cups. Consequently, this has made packaging a priority for many suppliers.

The packaging industry is working overtime to continue to deliver optimized packaging for the safe delivery of items ranging from groceries to medical supplies. And the industry needs to do this remotely, while most employees work from home during the lockdown.

Orange has scaled up the company’s Microsoft Skype for Business solution to accommodate meetings of 250 people.

The rapid move to home working

As COVID-19 started to take hold several months ago, this global packaging equipment manufacturing supplier closed its sites in China to ensure its employees’ safety. As a result, the company needed to support an additional 2,000 employees working from home. This was an enormous leap given it normally had capacity for only 400 remote users at any one time. Initially, performance was an issue, so the company’s CIO asked Orange Business to take any required action to bring the business back on track.

The customer was using the Orange Flexible SSL platform, a simple, secure cloud solution that allows users to work remotely as if they were in their usual offices. The company had three gateways across the globe. To ensure secure remote working, users are authenticated onto the VPN, and transactions between the user and company are encrypted.

To address its immediate need for remote working, the customer had increased its number of users via the self-management portal. To support these workers, Orange increased the number of licenses and doubled the bandwidth on the gateway that serves the Asia Pacific region. This helped users regain performance and ensured the business was not dramatically impacted by the switch to home working.

Broader impact

When the worldwide pandemic was declared, the company needed to lock down sites in Italy and other European countries. Again this required an upgrade of the infrastructure of the SSL gateway serving the area together with increased licenses.

Orange doubled the company’s bandwidth in the Asia Pacific region. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, it was increased from 30 Mbps to 200 Mbps. A second gateway in Europe will mainly be used for redundancy in case of failure, and Orange is in the process of doubling bandwidth on the organizations’ Americas gateway. This has resulted in the customer now having capacity for 6,000 users working from home, if required. Orange also advised the customer to start using split tunneling on their network. This approach will allow them to select specific traffic to be routed across the private network, while other traffic is offloaded to the Internet.

Orange has also scaled up the company’s Microsoft Skype for Business solution to accommodate meetings of 250 people. This had to be done in days so that the company could effectively update all of its departments on its pandemic strategy.

Retaining productivity remotely

The pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on the workplace, with many companies having to support their entire workforces working from home. We have worked closely with our customer from the very beginning of the crisis to ensure their employees are productive remotely and can operate crucial services during this pandemic so its customers can satisfy the need for safe, hygienic packaging.

Capacity for 6,000 working from home